Taiwan’s recent election results have become a bit of a Rorschach test — what people see reflects what they want to see. For Beijing, the results reflect a popular repudiation of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) policies, including her approach to cross-Strait relations. Many in the Nationalist Party (KMT) reached a similar conclusion and feel validated in their conviction that settling down cross-Strait tensions is a prerequisite to solving Taiwan’s other challenges. For many in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the results carry a different lesson, namely that pushing through too many reforms too fast and without sufficient regard for their social impact is politically damaging. In the lead-up to Taiwan’s presidential election over the next 13 months, these divergent narratives could lead each actor in different directions.

Beijing’s proximate goal during this period appears to be to undermine public confidence in President Tsai’s ability to administer Taiwan effectively. Beijing wants to diminish the possibility that Taiwan’s voters will re-elect Tsai. To do so, Beijing likely will amplify discontent, including by spreading disinformation. Beijing also will seek to bypass Taipei and reach out directly to local governments with mainland-friendly leaders to show that such an orientation leads to material benefits for its peoples. They will seek to attract support from Taiwan businessmen and Taiwan’s youth by highlighting the economic opportunities that can be unlocked by a more open attitude toward the mainland. At the same time, Beijing almost certainly will maintain a hard line against President Tsai and her administration, including by intensifying military pressure against Taiwan and further squeezing Taiwan’s international space. Overall, Beijing’s hard-soft approach likely will get both harder and softer in the coming months, as Beijing seeks to sharpen the contrast for Taiwan voters between the risks of moving away from and the benefits of moving closer to the mainland.

The KMT leadership likely will try to highlight the material benefits that its newly elected local leaders are securing for citizens in places like Kaohsiung and Taichung. They will seek to show that a friendly posture toward Beijing has led to more mainland tourists and expanded opportunities for agricultural exports to the mainland, among other things. In so doing, the KMT risks creating unrealistic public expectations of a windfall that may not materialize, especially in the relatively short period before the next presidential election. In other words, the KMT may confront a political challenge similar to its experience during the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration — demonstrating that conciliation leads to quality-of-life improvements for Taiwan’s workers, and not just its tycoons.

If Beijing stubbornly insists on keeping all doors closed to the Tsai administration, as appears likely, then Tsai will look elsewhere for open doors. It is a law of diplomatic physics that the more Beijing squeezes Taiwan, the more Taiwan authorities turn to other partners to counteract Chinese pressure.

Typically, Taiwan’s diplomatic diversification strategies begin with the United States. Throughout 2019, the Tsai administration likely will want to show progress in visibly and tangibly strengthening relations with Washington, both on its own merits, and also as an example for other partners (e.g., Japan, India, Australia, European Union, Southeast Asian countries) to emulate. Strengthening unofficial U.S.-Taiwan ties could take many forms: additional arms sales, senior-level visits, more high-profile transits by President Tsai through the United States, new U.S.-Taiwan collaboration with third partners on shared challenges such as cybersecurity or public health, new U.S.-Taiwan initiatives to expand educational and tourism exchanges, agreements to strengthen trade and economic relations, and so on.

But such an approach also carries several risks. For instance, if the pace of progress does not conform to Taiwan’s political calendar, or if Taiwan politicians publicly predict breakthroughs (e.g., concluding a U.S.-Taiwan free trade agreement) that prove to be out of reach, then the Taiwan public will be left with unmet expectations. Another risk is that U.S.-Taiwan ties could become a political football inside Taiwan’s fractious electoral environment, particularly if the 2020 presidential debate revolves around the question of whether Beijing is Taiwan’s gateway to the rest of the world, as members of the KMT argue, or whether Taiwan can bypass Beijing to deepen ties elsewhere, as members of the DPP contend. On the flip side, there also is risk of a “punish the traitor” dynamic emerging, particularly if DPP candidates accuse KMT politicians of appeasing the mainland and selling out Taiwan.

Another risk is that cross-Strait relations could become a more central feature of U.S.-China relations than has been the case over the past several years. There presently is under-developed muscle memory at senior levels of the U.S.-China relationship for managing cross-Strait tensions. At the same time, U.S.-China relations arguably are more strained now than at any time in the past 40 years. As a consequence, there are fewer shock absorbers in the U.S.-China relationship, which will amplify tensions and add stress to efforts to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.

In other words, cross-Strait dynamics are likely to grow more complex in the coming months, as Beijing further squeezes Taipei and President Tsai responds by looking elsewhere for support. The decisions that leaders in Taipei, Washington, and Beijing make during this period could have profound consequences for the future of the region. Let’s hope those decisions are guided by wisdom, cool-headedness, and patience.

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By Ryan Hass
Taiwan’s recent election results have become a bit of a Rorschach test — what people see reflects what they want to see. For Beijing, the results reflect a popular repudiation of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) policies, including her approach to cross-Strait relations. Many in the Nationalist Party (KMT) reached a similar conclusion and feel validated in their conviction that settling down cross-Strait tensions is a prerequisite to solving Taiwan’s other challenges. For many in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the results carry a different lesson, namely that pushing through too many reforms too fast and without sufficient regard for their social impact is politically damaging. In the lead-up to Taiwan’s presidential election over the next 13 months, these divergent narratives could lead each actor in different directions.
Beijing’s proximate goal during this period appears to be to undermine public confidence in President Tsai’s ability to administer Taiwan effectively. Beijing wants to diminish the possibility that Taiwan’s voters will re-elect Tsai. To do so, Beijing likely will amplify discontent, including by spreading disinformation. Beijing also will seek to bypass Taipei and reach out directly to local governments with mainland-friendly leaders to show that such an orientation leads to material benefits for its peoples. They will seek to attract support from Taiwan businessmen and Taiwan’s youth by highlighting the economic opportunities that can be unlocked by a more open attitude toward the mainland. At the same time, Beijing almost certainly will maintain a hard line against President Tsai and her administration, including by intensifying military pressure against Taiwan and further squeezing Taiwan’s international space. Overall, Beijing’s hard-soft approach likely will get both harder and softer in the coming months, as Beijing seeks to sharpen the contrast for Taiwan voters between the risks of moving away from and the benefits of moving closer to the mainland.
The KMT leadership likely will try to highlight the material benefits that its newly elected local leaders are securing for citizens in places like Kaohsiung and Taichung. They will seek to show that a friendly posture toward Beijing has led to more mainland tourists and expanded opportunities for agricultural exports to the mainland, among other things. In so doing, the KMT risks creating unrealistic public expectations of a windfall that may not materialize, especially in the relatively short period before the next presidential election. In other words, the KMT may confront a political challenge similar to its experience during the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration — demonstrating that conciliation leads to quality-of-life improvements for Taiwan’s workers, and not just its tycoons.
If Beijing stubbornly insists on keeping all doors closed to the Tsai administration, as appears likely, then Tsai will look elsewhere for open doors. It is a law of diplomatic physics that the more Beijing squeezes Taiwan, the more Taiwan authorities turn to other partners to counteract Chinese pressure.
Typically, Taiwan’s diplomatic diversification strategies begin with the United States. Throughout 2019, the Tsai administration likely will want to show progress in visibly and tangibly strengthening relations with Washington, both on its own merits, and also as an example for other partners (e.g., Japan, India, Australia, European Union, Southeast Asian countries) to emulate. Strengthening unofficial U.S.-Taiwan ties could take many forms: additional arms sales, senior-level visits, more high-profile transits by President Tsai through the United States, new U.S.-Taiwan collaboration with third partners on shared challenges such as cybersecurity or public health, new U.S.-Taiwan initiatives to expand ... By Ryan Hass
Taiwan’s recent election results have become a bit of a Rorschach test — what people see reflects what they want to see. For Beijing, the results reflect a popular repudiation of President Tsai Ing-wen’https://www.brookings.edu/media-mentions/20181216-time-todd-stern/20181216 Time Todd Sternhttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/587956094/0/brookingsrss/topics/china~Time-Todd-Stern/
Sun, 16 Dec 2018 22:03:28 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=media-mention&p=553617

Paul Gewirtz is the Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School and the director of Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center. He teaches and writes in various legal and policy fields, including constitutional law, U.S. foreign policy and law, U.S.-China relations, Chinese law, federal courts, law and literature, anti-discrimination law, and comparative law. He is also a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, which Gewirtz founded in 1999 as The China Law Center, carries out research and teaching, and also undertakes a wide range of cooperative projects with Chinese counterparts to help advance China’s legal reforms and to improve U.S.-China relations. From 1997–98, Gewirtz was on leave from Yale University and part of President Bill Clinton’s administration, where he served as special representative for the Presidential Rule of Law Initiative. In that post, he developed and led the U.S.-China initiative to cooperate in the legal field that President Clinton and China’s President Jiang Zemin agreed to at their 1997 and 1998 Summit meetings.

Gewirtz was also the founder of Yale Law School’s Global Constitutionalism Seminar, which brings leading Supreme Court judges from around the world to Yale each year, and was the Seminar’s director for 10 years. Before joining the Yale faculty, Gewirtz served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He was recently named the inaugural Jones Day Chair Professor in Globalization and the Rule of Law at Peking University Law School. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute. He received his bachelors degree summa cum laude from Columbia University and his law degree from Yale.

Affiliations:
American Law Institute, member
Asia Society Task Force on U.S.-China Relations, member
Council on Foreign Relations, member
District of Columbia Bar and Supreme Court of the United States Bar, member

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By Rachel Slattery
Paul Gewirtz is the Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School and the director of Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center. He teaches and writes in various legal and policy fields, including constitutional law, U.S. foreign policy and law, U.S.-China relations, Chinese law, federal courts, law and literature, anti-discrimination law, and comparative law. He is also a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.
Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, which Gewirtz founded in 1999 as The China Law Center, carries out research and teaching, and also undertakes a wide range of cooperative projects with Chinese counterparts to help advance China’s legal reforms and to improve U.S.-China relations. From 1997–98, Gewirtz was on leave from Yale University and part of President Bill Clinton's administration, where he served as special representative for the Presidential Rule of Law Initiative. In that post, he developed and led the U.S.-China initiative to cooperate in the legal field that President Clinton and China's President Jiang Zemin agreed to at their 1997 and 1998 Summit meetings.
Gewirtz was also the founder of Yale Law School’s Global Constitutionalism Seminar, which brings leading Supreme Court judges from around the world to Yale each year, and was the Seminar’s director for 10 years. Before joining the Yale faculty, Gewirtz served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He was recently named the inaugural Jones Day Chair Professor in Globalization and the Rule of Law at Peking University Law School. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute. He received his bachelors degree summa cum laude from Columbia University and his law degree from Yale.
Affiliations:
American Law Institute, member
Asia Society Task Force on U.S.-China Relations, member
Council on Foreign Relations, member
District of Columbia Bar and Supreme Court of the United States Bar, member By Rachel Slattery
Paul Gewirtz is the Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School and the director of Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center. He teaches and writes in various legal and policy fields, including constitutional ... https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/are-the-goals-of-the-paris-accord-slipping-out-of-reach/Are the goals of the Paris Accord slipping out of reach?http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/584240608/0/brookingsrss/topics/china~Are-the-goals-of-the-Paris-Accord-slipping-out-of-reach/
Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:30:37 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=on-the-record&p=551850

Attending China’s World Internet Conference—China’s annual showcase for its vision of internet governance—was preceded by the irony of preparing to minimize connection to the internet. I took none of my usual devices. Instead, I rented a smartphone for a week and installed a minimal number of apps, including a virtual private network (VPN) service before leaving. I set up a temporary email account. I took a “thin client” office laptop with a secure VPN connector and nothing on its hard drive.

This congress was China’s fifth World Internet Congress, held each time in the ancient canal town of Wuzhen and centered on promoting China’s vision for a system of internet governance led by government and structured to protect national sovereignty. This is an alternative to the multistakeholder system that evolved in the United States and has grown organically into an international system. China, Russia, and other nations see this as a product of the U.S. and an international system they were not part of. The high-level attention and resources China puts into these congresses reflect a level of commitment to advocating its alternative unmatched by the U.S.

Unlike the previous two years’ conferences, this one did not feature speakers as high-profile as President Xi Jinping or Apple’s Tim Cook. But Xi was much quoted by Chinese officials, and mentions of “collective governance,” “cyber sovereignty,” “mutual respect,” “multilateralism,” and United Nations leadership were frequent. (A presenter from France got into the spirit with a presentation entitled “creating a digital world of mutual trust and collective governance—towards a community with a shared future in cyberspace;” it wasn’t clear how the content related to this topic but the title offered a deep bow to the hosts).

The Brookings delegation was there for a “high-level think tank forum,” a roundtable exchange led on the Chinese side by the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on the general topic of U.S.-China relations in cyberspace. The discussion was divided into two parts, a general assessment of the state of relations followed by a discussion of issues presented by development of artificial intelligence.

It is fair to say that the first topic did not get much beyond the broader issues of the U.S.-China relationship. The developing trade war provided the backdrop, and the conference took place as Donald Trump was holding his post-election press conference crediting his policies with keeping China from passing America as an economic power. All that feeds Chinese perceptions that the U.S.—under this administration at least—is opposed not simply to Chinese policies, but views the rise of China as an inherent threat. Add to these China’s seemingly reduced commitment to the 2015 Xi-Obama agreement on cyber-espionage for commercial purposes and an indefinite postponement of an ongoing cyber dialogue, and it was hard to find common ground.

The discussion on artificial intelligence struck a different note, though. Despite reports presenting AI development as a new arms race between China and the U.S. (development of some automated weapons systems could become a literal arms race) and China’s targeting of AI development as a strategic centerpiece of its industrial strategy, there was common concern with the social issues of ethics, discrimination, and the future of work arising from AI.

My own comments were aimed at what may be the self-limiting effect of China’s intranet defined by national borders. Network theory measures the value of networks by Metcalfe’s Law, where network value is a function of the square of the number of nodes or points of connection on the network. China has reached 800 million internet users, a number that exceeds the entire populations of the United States, Brazil, and Indonesia combined. With so many points of connection within its borders, China alone can generate significant network effects. But it still represents only 20 percent of the world’s internet users, which means that by itself it can generate only four percent of the effects possible from a global network. China is choosing to cut off part of these effects.

Of course, China is not entirely cut off from the world in a virtual Middle Kingdom. As one Chinese internet investor put it in the recent New York Timesspecial report on China, “We still get the information we need for economic modernization.” But the ability to conduct business is only one among many benefits of being connected.

China’s leaders have managed its rise with extraordinary drive and agility for several decades. To sustain that rise in the decades ahead, they have to move increasingly from Deng Xiaoping’s “crossing the river by feeling the stones” to high wire acts in several directions. Can they successfully root out a system of corruption without alienating the power structures that have benefited? Can they meet the growing energy and other resource demands at the same time as serious environmental and climate goals? Can they turn their enterprises into efficient market actors that remain instruments of state policies? And the trickiest act of them all: can they juggle all these things and keep economic growth going enough to satisfy the rising expectations of the people and maintain their support?

China’s internet model parallels these challenges. In the long term, can China sustain its own carefully controlled network and still reap all the economic and social benefits of global connectedness it needs?

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By Cameron F. Kerry
Attending China’s World Internet Conference—China’s annual showcase for its vision of internet governance—was preceded by the irony of preparing to minimize connection to the internet. I took none of my usual devices. Instead, I rented a smartphone for a week and installed a minimal number of apps, including a virtual private network (VPN) service before leaving. I set up a temporary email account. I took a “thin client” office laptop with a secure VPN connector and nothing on its hard drive.
This congress was China’s fifth World Internet Congress, held each time in the ancient canal town of Wuzhen and centered on promoting China’s vision for a system of internet governance led by government and structured to protect national sovereignty. This is an alternative to the multistakeholder system that evolved in the United States and has grown organically into an international system. China, Russia, and other nations see this as a product of the U.S. and an international system they were not part of. The high-level attention and resources China puts into these congresses reflect a level of commitment to advocating its alternative unmatched by the U.S.
Unlike the previous two years’ conferences, this one did not feature speakers as high-profile as President Xi Jinping or Apple’s Tim Cook. But Xi was much quoted by Chinese officials, and mentions of “collective governance,” “cyber sovereignty,” “mutual respect,” “multilateralism,” and United Nations leadership were frequent. (A presenter from France got into the spirit with a presentation entitled “creating a digital world of mutual trust and collective governance—towards a community with a shared future in cyberspace;” it wasn’t clear how the content related to this topic but the title offered a deep bow to the hosts).
The Brookings delegation was there for a “high-level think tank forum,” a roundtable exchange led on the Chinese side by the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on the general topic of U.S.-China relations in cyberspace. The discussion was divided into two parts, a general assessment of the state of relations followed by a discussion of issues presented by development of artificial intelligence.
It is fair to say that the first topic did not get much beyond the broader issues of the U.S.-China relationship. The developing trade war provided the backdrop, and the conference took place as Donald Trump was holding his post-election press conference crediting his policies with keeping China from passing America as an economic power. All that feeds Chinese perceptions that the U.S.—under this administration at least—is opposed not simply to Chinese policies, but views the rise of China as an inherent threat. Add to these China’s seemingly reduced commitment to the 2015 Xi-Obama agreement on cyber-espionage for commercial purposes and an indefinite postponement of an ongoing cyber dialogue, and it was hard to find common ground.
The discussion on artificial intelligence struck a different note, though. Despite reports presenting AI development as a new arms race between China and the U.S. (development of some automated weapons systems could become a literal arms race) and China’s targeting of AI development as a strategic centerpiece of its industrial strategy, there was common concern with the social issues of ethics, discrimination, and the future of work arising from AI.
My own comments were aimed at what may be the self-limiting effect of China’s intranet defined by national borders. Network theory measures the value of networks by Metcalfe’s Law, where network value is a function of the square of the number of nodes or points of connection on the network. China has reached 800 million internet ... By Cameron F. Kerry
Attending China’s World Internet Conference—China’s annual showcase for its vision of internet governance—was preceded by the irony of preparing to minimize connection to the internet.